Improving smallholder welfare in the rural sectors of developing countries requires improving access to both input and product markets. Success, however, in developing sustainable and mutually beneficial links between smallholders and agribusiness has been variable. Two recent ACIAR studies...

Availability of seed and farm production factors, i.e., land and farm labour, formed a single factor that was found to be the most important factor influencing East-Javanese farmers’ decision to purchase seed. While such would suggest that the resulting impact of the factor may influence the...

A plethora of approaches to modeling market power has been reported in the literature. These can be broadly divided into one-side and two-side behavioral models. This paper uses versions of these models to develop a theoretical framework to test market power in the output and input markets in...

Population pressure in Indonesia, especially in the inner islands of Java and Madura, has compelled the government to seek other areas to expand agricultural lands as well as to resettle people from these inner islands to the less-populated outer islands, such as Borneo. The tidal swamplands in...

Total factor productivity growth in the agricultural, industry and services sectors is studied in this paper for two countries: Thailand and Indonesia, over the period 1981 to 2002. A feature of the analysis is the decomposition of aggregate total factor productivity growth into two components:...

In many areas of developing countries, economic and institutional factors often combine to give farmers incentives to clear forests and repeatedly plant food crops without sufficiently replenishing the soils. These activities lead to large-scale land degradation and contribute to global warming...

Following the global spike in food prices in 2008, there is renewed interest in Indonesia in self-sufficiency as a means of achieving food security. Restrictive trade policies, including specific tariffs on rice and sugar, and quantitative restrictions on imports and exports, have been used in...

This paper argues that recent increases in international food prices worsened poverty incidence in Indonesia, even though many poor farmers benefited. This conclusion is based on the application of a multi-sectoral, multi-household general equilibrium model of the Indonesian economy. The...

Aiming to support downstream processing, the Indonesian government announced an export tax in May 2010. Using a partial equilibrium approach, this paper therefore attempts to analyse: (i) whether the Indonesian government has imposed optimal taxes on cocoa beans; (ii) the impacts of cocoa export...

Trade negotiators are concerned about the possible negative effects of trade liberalisation on employment in specific sectors. The agricultural sector has characteristics that make it different from industrial or service sectors. These are an informal labour force, low productivity, relative...